How Flowmon can help you grow your career?

Three weeks ago I was giving a presentation to a customer and you wouldn’t believe what question I have received. “So how the deployment of Flowmon can help me and my colleague to grow in career?” Wow!

I was confused, as this is not a regular question one is receiving during the introduction meeting. Usually I receive questions like: “What type of info can Flowmon deliver?” “How alerting is done in Flowmon?” “How the detection methods work in Flowmon Anomaly Detection System?”. But the aforementioned one was really different and honestly, a bit unexpected.

As I’m a calm guy, I didn’t react immediately to avoid saying something unreasonable or completely irrelevant. The question laid down in my head and I started to see a sense why it was asked. Of course he wants to know that. He is going to present benefits of Flowmon to his boss and obviously he wants to be the best in his eyes. He wants to show him his professionality. Maybe also a personal bonus is included. Actually, it was a very relevant question!

It required a lot of courage to be so open in front of a person I had never met before. And my answer? Maybe it is obvious, maybe not, but I answered via the following points:

With monitoring and visibility, you know exactly what is going on in your network. Thanks to that all the admins are aware of everything and they can very easily find whatever they are looking for. So if there is any issue, you can discover and solve it within few hours. It means you are much more effective and can spent your precious time on another (maybe more important) tasks. In the end of the day it is about saving money as well.

As you are monitoring the traffic in the network, you can very easily find out security breaches. And I think every organization is going to be grateful to detect ransomware Locky (encrypting shared files and blackmailing afterwards), or massive upload of internal data to external shared storage services (especially if the employee is on leave notice), or even compromised DNS servers (stealing login credentials and much more). All of them and much more might be detected via traffic analysis and in the end of the day save a lot of resources to the organization.

Do you know if users are using only allowed services and applications? I’m sure no one wants his employees to run a torrent in their network and I will bet it is against company policies in 99 % organizations. In the end it might compromise the whole reputation and nobody wants that (not even mentioning high chance of infection). Do you know what your employees are doing when you are not watching?

Some questions can always surprise me like this one with Flowmon and career growth. Flowmon is not a tool for a career growth, it must be clear. It’s a network monitoring and analysis solution. Even though, it helps network professionals to develop their skills and also to grow career at the end of the day. How? By knowing advanced network monitoring, the one will achieve knowledge, which will shift his skills on the next level. In the end the person is able to manage the IT environment as a professional and with that receive appreciation from management as well.

When we talk about the business value of a tool or a system that (at first point) may seem like a “nice to have” or “helpful but not absolutely necessary” technology or system, it is good idea to start this discussion...